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A Bid to Keep Youths Out of Adult Prisons

Nicole Miera with a portrait of her brother, who committed suicide at 17 while being held as an adult.Credit
Matthew Staver for The New York Times

DENVER — James Stewart died alone.

The 17-year-old from Denver had committed a terrible act: while driving drunk, he slammed into another vehicle head on and killed its driver. Initially placed with other juvenile offenders, he was moved to the county lockup after the district attorney charged him as an adult. Left alone in his cell despite his frantic pleas to be with others, he tightened his bedsheets around his neck and killed himself.

His death, in 2008, was one of two suicides by young people in Colorado jails that helped spur a significant change in state law last year by narrowing the authority of prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults and to place them in adult jails, part of a wave of such laws nationwide.

In a reversal of the tough-on-crime legislation that swept the nation in the late 1980s and ’90s, nearly half of the states have now enacted one or more laws that nudge more young offenders into the juvenile justice system, divert them from being automatically tried as adults and keep them from being placed in adult jails and prisons.

Sarah Brown, a director of the criminal justice program at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said the shift stems from a decline in juvenile crime, concerns about the costs of adult prisons and a growing understanding of adolescent brain development showing that the young have a greater potential for rehabilitation.

The Supreme Court has increasingly taken neurological research into account on juvenile justice issues — most recently in a 2012 case,Miller v. Alabama, which barred mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for those who committed their crimes before they turned 18. Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in the case cited adolescents’ “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change.”

Eleven states, including Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, have passed laws that keep most young offenders out of adult jails and prisons. Eight states, including California, Missouri and Washington, passed laws that alter mandatory minimum sentencing for young offenders charged as adults. Four — Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and Mississippi — have broadened the powers of their juvenile courts, enabling them to take cases of juveniles who would have automatically been tried as adults. And 12 states, including Arizona, Nevada, Ohio and Utah, have adjusted the laws governing the transfer of young offenders into the adult system in ways that make it more likely that they will be tried as juveniles.

Photo

James Stewart with his mother, Barbara Stewart, center, and sister Vanessa Miera. Charged as an adult after a fatal drunken-driving accident, James died alone in his county lockup cell.

Many of these bills have passed with bipartisan support in states both Republican and Democratic and with the testimony of the young who are affected and their families, said Liz Ryan, the president of Campaign for Youth Justice, which recently issued a report on the shifts.

In Colorado, James Stewart’s sister Nicole Miera worked with a local advocacy group, the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition, and testified before the state legislature. The bill passed with bipartisan support. Kim Dvorchak, the executive director of the coalition, said that since the changes, the number of young people put directly into the adult system in Colorado has dropped by nearly 85 percent and that the rate of adult jailing of minors has fallen by 92 percent, with no increase in juvenile crime.

“We gave more kids an opportunity to have a second lease on life,” she said.

It was in 1993 that Colorado passed its laws giving prosecutors broad authority to charge young offenders as adults. Ms. Dvorchak said the system became little more than a “plea mill,” with juveniles represented by lawyers who worked chiefly with adult defendants, and who urged many of them to accept plea bargains. “No one had any independent review of whether that was appropriate for the child,” she said. Juveniles who lost at trial faced mandatory sentencing guidelines and felony convictions that could ruin their career prospects.

Ms. Dvorchak’s initial attempts to change the system failed. Legislators, she found, had been convinced by prosecutors that the minors they chose to try as adults were the worst offenders — “serial killers and rapists.” Her group produced a report that showed that 85 percent of the 1,800 cases over a 10-year period involved middle- to low-level felonies like robbery, assault and burglary; only 15 percent involved homicides and 5 percent first-degree murder.

When Ms. Miera joined forces with Ms. Dvorchak, her compelling story about her brother and the new data from the advocacy group helped change lawmakers’ minds just as other states were changing their laws. They found an ally in State Representative B. J. Nikkel, a Republican, who assembled a bipartisan coalition that overcame prosecutors’ objections. “It was the hardest-fought bill I ever worked on,” Ms. Nikkel said.

She said the old system “put too much power in one place — the district attorneys,” who, she argued, were biased in favor of racking up convictions. Her legislation is about “giving a role back to a judge to actually look at the information from both the prosecution side and the defense side, so they can weigh this out.” Her work, she added, was influenced in part by groups like Right on Crime, a conservative organization that highlights the potential for budget savings in criminal justice reform.

The state’s district attorneys are unhappy with the change. Peter Weir, a prosecutor in Jefferson and Gilpin Counties, called the law “abysmal,” and a step back from a system for young offenders that he said was working. Prosecutors do not follow a bias to convict people, he said, and prosecutors develop acute insight when it comes to juvenile cases — better, he said, than most judges. “This is a function of experience and is a function of years and years of weighing one case against similarly situated cases,” he said.

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A Colorado law gives prosecutors like Peter Weir less authority in charging juveniles.Credit
Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Tom Raynes, the executive director of the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council, said the new system has led to extensive delays in prosecution that he called “a disservice, we think, to victims, to the public and frankly, we think, to the defendant.”

Mr. Weir cited a recent case involving months of wrangling over whether a young defendant charged with murder should be tried as an adult. He said that while all defendants deserve the right to representation and due process, in the case so far there have been 16 filings by prosecutors, 27 by the defense, and dozens of witnesses lined up for the hearings to come, which he called “horribly counterproductive.”

He said, “What we’re fighting is a philosophy that a juvenile should never be tried as an adult.”

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Ms. Miera disputed Mr. Weir’s interpretation of the activists’ view: She said that she believed some juveniles show such cruelty and viciousness that they should be charged as adults.

But James, she argued, was not one of those. “My brother didn’t premeditate to go out and murder somebody,” she said, adding that during the weeks he was in the juvenile system, James spoke of wanting to visit schools to talk about drunken driving. When he was moved into the adult system, he grew despondent.

The family found out about the suicide the day after it happened; they were sitting in a courtroom waiting for one of his hearings when detectives came in with the news.

Her brother, Ms. Miera said, had done “something terrible.”

Still, she said: “He was a good kid. He was the poster boy of how your life can change in two minutes.”

She dug in her purse and pulled out the pen that Gov. John W. Hickenlooper used to sign the Colorado bill. “My brother thought he never accomplished anything,” she said. “And here we are.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2013, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bid to Keep Youths Out of Adult Prisons. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe